Cinnnamon, Rotterdam
For ART-O-RAMA 2017, Rotterdam-based gallery Cinnnamon presents a solo show by Dutch painter Esther Tielemans (b. 1976). Being one of the foremost Dutch painters of her generation, Tielemans has tested the outer limits of painting in the past decades. Starting from the tradition of landscape painting, she seeks to comprehend the foundations of painting and its significance as an art form. This has led her to explore painting as sculpture and installation, an exploration that further pushed her work into the realms of the abstract. However, the landscape is always present in Tielemans’ work. Her painterly installations are derived from the notion that the landscape can be read as a mise-en-scène.
Cinnnamon offers to show the artist’s latest series, “The past inside the present”. This series marks a return to the flat surface. The colour black, which previously appeared as shiny, mirroring monochrome panels, lost its shine in favour of a deep dimness, consisting of many shades and colours. Both the reference to the Modern and to the landscape linger in the background. In the words of art critic and curator Heske ten Cate: “The horizon has vanished, but it is still there: in the form of an Anthropocene world in which the earth and the atmosphere are intertwined (…)”
Presenting the works in a horizontal line emphasizes the vanished horizon. The works become windows, chapters in a movement, a “storyboard” rather than a mise-en-scène.